Government Demands Growing for Twitter User Data

In its first ever transparency report, Twitter reported Monday that the United States leads the pack when it comes to government demands for user data, having filed 679 requests in the first half of the year.

Worldwide, Twitter said it has received more government demands for data in the first six months of this year than all of last year.

In Twitterâ€™s Transparency Report, it said it has complied with 75 percent of user-data disclosure demands by producing â€œsome or all informationâ€ requested by U.S. authorities. Globally, the average was 63 percent.

Data previous to 2012 was not available. Twitter said it notifies its users of government demands â€œunless prohibited by law.â€

The closest country behind the United States was Japan, which lodged 98 requests with a 20 percent Twitter compliance rate. The United Kingdom and Canada came in with 11 requests, with an 18 percent compliance rate. All of the other countries in the 23-nation Twitter report registered with less than 10 government demands.

â€œWeâ€™ve received more government requests in the first half of 2012, as outlined in this initial dataset, than in the entirety of 2011,â€ Twitter said on its blog.

The disclosure follows Googleâ€™s lead â€” nearly two years ago, when the search giant turned heads by publishing a treasure trove of data surrounding government demands for user data, in addition to information on the number of takedown notices connected to copyright infringement.

â€œWednesday marks Independence Day here in the United States. Beyond the fireworks and barbecue, July 4th serves as an important reminder of the need to hold governments accountable, especially on behalf of those who may not have a chance to do so themselves,â€ Twitter said.

The Twitter report came the same day a New York state judge ordered the San Francisco-based microblogging site to divulge the tweets and account information allegedly connected to an Occupy protester.

Twitter did not say whether, at least in the United States, the authorities presented probable-cause warrants for user data. Manhattan Criminal Court Judge Matthew A. Sciarrino Jr.â€™s ruling Monday did not require local prosecutors to have probable cause to get the tweets and accompanying account information of an Occupy protester.

The company, however, listed a few reasons why it does not acquiesce to all government-issued, user-data requests.

â€œWe do not comply with requests that fail to identify a Twitter user account. We may seek to narrow requests that are overly broad. In other cases, users may have challenged the requests after weâ€™ve notified them,â€ Twitter said. Most famously, Twitter successfully fought to allow individuals being investigated for their connections to WikiLeaks to challenge requests for their Twitter data.

In a separate reporting category, Twitter said it received 3,378 requests to remove copyrighted material from Twitter in the United States for the first half of the year. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act requires internet service providers to remove works, at the copyright holderâ€™s request, to avoid legal liability.

Overall, Twitter said it removed 38 percent of the material specified in the takedown requests. Among other reasons, Twitter said it does not comply with all requests because sometimes they â€œfail to provide sufficient informationâ€ or were â€œmisfiled.â€

Twitter also reported that it did not comply with any of the handful of requests from France, Greece, Pakistan, Turkey and the United Kingdom to remove content that is illegal in those nations.

Twitterâ€™s not the first to follow Googleâ€™s transparency lead â€“ Dropbox, LinkedIn, SpiderOak and SonicNet beat Twitter to it.

Among those who ought to be next: Facebook, AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, Yahoo, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and Microsoft.

A New York judge has ordered Twitter to divulge the tweets and account information allegedly connected to an Occupy protester.

The case, which the judge called one of â€œfirst impression,â€ concerns Malcolm Harris, who was among hundreds arrested Oct. 1 in an Occupy movement march along the Brooklyn Bridge.

Prosecutors sought tweets made to Harrisâ€™ account â€œto refute the defendantâ€™s anticipated defense, that the police either led or escorted the defendant into stepping onto the roadway of the Brooklyn Bridge.â€

While the outcome was expected, the case was being closely watched as the authorities increasingly monitor and move to access material posted on social networks. And the decision comes as Twitter reported that, for the first six months of the year, the United States sought information on Twitter user accounts 679 times, and Twitter produced some or all of the information 75 percent of the time.

Prosecutors sought Harrisâ€™ Twitter information using a 2703 order, which allows authorities to obtain data without a warrant.

Manhattan Criminal Court Judge Matthew A. Sciarrino Jr. said in a filing released Monday that Harris has no expectation of privacy in his public tweets:

If you post a tweet, just like if you scream it out the window, there is no reasonable
expectation of privacy. There is no proprietary interest in your tweets, which you have now gifted to the world. This is not the same as a private email, a private direct message, a private chat, or any of the other readily available ways to have a private conversation via the internet that now exist. Those private dialogues would require a warrant based on probable cause in order to access the relevant information.

The judge said he would read the tweets privately before allowing any into the case. In a bid to corroborate that the tweets were posted by Harris, the judge authorized Twitter to turn over the account information connected to the account of @destructuremal, including any information Twitter had about the owner of the account, including his e-mail address. The authorities believe that account belongs to Harris.

Manhattan prosecutors were elated with the decision.

â€œWe look forward to Twitterâ€™s complying and to moving forward with the trial,â€ Chief Assistant District Attorney Daniel R. Alonso said in a statement.

It was the second time the judge had ruled on the Harris matter.

On April 20, Sciarrino denied Harrisâ€™ motion to quash the subpoena, saying he had no standing to fight the order because Harris had â€œno proprietary interestsâ€ in the account holderâ€™s information or in the tweets. To back this assertion, the judge quoted from Twitterâ€™s terms of service, which has subsequently been modified, stating that account holders granted Twitter â€œworldwide, non-exclusiveâ€ right to use use, copy, or display the content.

Since the defendant granted this license to Twitter by agreeing to the terms of service, this â€œdemonstrates a lack of proprietary interests in his Tweets,â€ the judge wrote.

In response, Twitter stepped in and moved to quash the subpoena, (.pdf) which the judge denied:

While the U.S. Constitution clearly did not take into consideration any tweets by our founding fathers, it is probably safe to assume that Samuel Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson would have loved to tweet their opinions as much as they loved to write for the newspapers of their day (sometimes under anonymous pseudonyms similar to todayâ€™s twitter user names). Those men, and countless soldiers in service to this nation, have risked their lives for our right to tweet or to post an article on Facebook; but that is not the same as arguing that those public tweets are protected. The Constitution gives you the right to post, but as numerous people have learned, there are still consequences for your public posts. What you give to the public belongs to the
public. What you keep to yourself belongs only to you.

The American Civil Liberties Union blasted the outcome.

â€œThe United States Supreme Court and courts around the country have repeatedly made clear that individuals whose constitutional rights are implicated by government requests for information to third parties have standing to challenge those third-party requests, and thereâ€™s no reason for the result to be different when Internet activities are at issue, regardless of whether individuals â€˜ownâ€™ their Internet speech or whether the Internet companies â€˜ownâ€™ it,â€ ACLU attorney Adam Fine said.

Twitter pointed out that prosecutors could have saved everyone the trouble of dealing with this in court if they had simply printed or downloaded the publicly available tweets themselves.

â€œTo the extent the desired content is publicly available, the district attorney could presumably have an investigator print or download it without further burdening Twitter or the court,â€ Twitter wrote in its motion.

However, without the account information connected to the tweets, those messages might not be admissible in court.